Personal

A transition from an author’s book to his conversation, is too often like an entrance into a large city, after a distant prospect. Remotely, we see nothing but spires of temples and turrets of palaces, and imagine it the residence of splendour, grandeur and magnificence; but when we have passed the gates, we find it perplexed with narrow passages, disgraced with despicable cottages, embarrassed with obstructions, and clouded with smoke.1

Behind a remarkable scholar one often finds a mediocre man, and behind a mediocre artist, often, a remarkable man.2

Work

I am a freelance writer & researcher. (To make ends meet, I sell advertising on gwern.net, have a Patreon, benefit from Bitcoin appreciation thanks to some old coins, and live frugally.) I have worked for, published in, or consulted for: Wired (2015), MIRI/SIAI4 (2012-2013), CFAR (2012), GiveWell (2017), the FBI (2016), A Global Village (2013), Cool Tools (2013), Quantimodo (2013), New World Encyclopedia (2006), Bitcoin Weekly (2011), Mobify (2013-2014), Bellroy (2013-2014), Dominic Frisby (2014), and private clients (2009-); everything on gwern.net should be considered my own viewpoint or writing unless otherwise specified by a representative or publication. I am currently not accepting new commissions.

Websites

Social news, discussion:

I don’t speak, Bijaz said. I operate a machine called language. It creaks and groans, but is mine own.5

I have no connection to the French singer or with gwern.com, any locations in Wales, the gwern on MySpace, or either account on Pivory.com (which are connected to an attempted extortion of me).

Wikis

I have been active on the English Wikipedia and related projects since January 2004. Cumulatively9, I have over 90,000 edits and have written or worked on hundreds of articles; during my time as an English administrator, I performed thousands of administrative actions; I am an admin on the Haskell wiki, handling routine spam & vandalism:

Profile

This section covers some of the most important things possible to know about me: my personality and mental description. No doubt some readers expected a carefully airbrushed & potted biography describing where & when I was raised, what my familial & tribal affiliations are, or what famous institutions I am affiliated with; even though this information is almost entirely useless - what can one predict about me if one knows that I was born in Illinois and raised on Long Island, but (maybe) my accent and a general liberalism? The irony - that people want most the information they will learn from least - will not be lost on those familiar with signaling. In contrast, standardized & validated psychometric instruments like the NEO-PI-R or RAPM really do have predictive validity for many life outcomes.

(Much of this data comes from YourMorals.org. I plan to retake the surveys, if possible, every decade; it will be interesting to see what changes.)

Personality

To describe my personality briefly: I am introverted, calm, neither particularly industrious nor lazy, contrary, and pathologically curious. I have made a copy of my 2011-2014 responses to the YourMorals.org corpus; discussed in more detail below. My scores on the Big 5 Personality Inventory, /long 1/2/3:

For those who enjoy playing the game of ad hominem via lay psychiatric diagnosis, may I suggest not accusing me of Asperger syndrome - which is so overdone - but something more novel & scary-sounding like schizoid personality disorder?

IQ

At the risk of alienating readers even further, I will reveal that I have taken IQ tests 3 times that I know of:

At some point in 3rd-5th grade, I took the Abbreviated Stanford-Binet and scored ~135. (I came across the report cleaning up a room as a child and could not keep it.)

In February 2009, for the purpose of a before-after dual n-back comparison, I took the Raven’s test at iqtest.dk and scored 115. (Others report they too received low scores; it seems, based on emails, that the maintainer renormed it on the population of online test-takers but has failed to disclose this publicly, which means it will be low by an unknown amount but possibly somewhere around 0.5 standard deviations, in addition to the usual large amount of measurement error in any short single-form IQ test.)

On 5 August 2011, I signed up for and took the entrance survey to the prediction-contest Good Judgment Project; the survey included among other things a short Raven’s test. My survey results include the raw data but not any norm: of the 12 questions, I got 8, while the mean among participants was 8.81 and the SD 2.39.

Other ways to approximate IQ are standardized tests which are heavily g-loaded; they are broadly consistent with the 130s decile:

Collaboration style

Once on #haskell, I was asked why I have no large programs to my credit; I replied, My problem is that most programs I use already exist.

I am not a bad Haskell programmer (although I am no guru like Simon Peyton-Jones, Apfelmus, or Don Stewart), but given how long I’ve been using Haskell, my contributions probably look pretty slim. This isn’t because I don’t like Haskell - I do, I find functional programming natural: defining transformation after transformation until the result is what I need. And of the functional languages, Haskell seems the best combination of power beyond basic arithmetic or list processing, one of the best ecosystems, and good basic language. (Which is not to say it’s perfect: there are some sharp edges in the basic math which irritate me when I’m messing around in the REPL.)

This is partly because of my style of contribution. I’ve always preferred to work on existing applications and libraries than to go write my own. I’ve always preferred to take someone else’s work and bring it up to snuff than write a clean implementation of my own. I’ve always preferred prodding the author or maintainer to do the right thing than to drop a large batch of patches onto them. Likewise, I view it as better to use Haskell standards like Cabal or Darcs than to use something like Autotools even if the latter lets us manage just a little more automation. I view it as better to upload to Hackage than to use any fancy site like Github or Sourceforge.

It’s better to do yeoman’s work taking two similar modules in two applications and split them out to a library than to write even the fanciest purely functionalfinger tree using monoids. Better to commit changes that reduce user configs by a line than to demonstrate once again the elegance of monads. Better by far to file a bug than wank around in #haskellgolfing expressions.

It is much better to find some people who have tried in the past to solve a problem and bring them together to solve it, than to solve it yourself - even if it means being a footnote (or less) in the announcement. What’s important is that it got done, and people will be using it. Not the credit. It is a high accomplishment indeed to factor out a bit of functionality into a library and make every possible user actually use it. Would that more Haskellers had this mindset! Indeed, would that more people in general had this mindset; as it is, people have bad habits of repeatedly failing when they think they have special information, are highly overconfident even in objective areas with quick feedback, and badly overestimate how many good ideas they can come up with16 - indeed, most good ideas are Not Invented Here. One should be able to draw upon the wisdom of others.

This is an ethos I learned working with the inclusionists of Wikipedia. No code is so bad that it contains no good; the most valuable code is that used by other code; credit is less important than work; a steady stream of small trivial improvements is better than occasional massive edits.

A leader is best when people barely know that he exists, not so good when people obey and acclaim him, worst when they despise him. Fail to honor people, They fail to honor you. But of a good leader, who talks little, when his work is done, his aims fulfilled, they will all say, We did this ourselves.17

This is not an ethos calculated to impress. Filing bug reports, helping newbies, commenting on articles and code, cabalizing & uploading code - these are things hard to evaluate or take credit for. They are useful, useful indeed (shepheb or, eg. myself, never boast in #xmonad of having helped 5 newbies today, but over the months and years, this friendliness and ready aid is of greater value than any module in all of XMonadContrib.) but they will never impress an interviewer or earn a fellowship. Is that too bad? Did I waste all my time?

I don’t think so. I value my contributions, and the Haskell community is better for it. It may have made my life a little more difficult - all that time spent on Haskell matters is time I did not devote to classes or jobs or what-have-you - but ultimately they did help somebody. One could do worse things with one’s time than that.

Coding contributions

I mostly contribute to projects in Haskell, my favorite language; I have contributed to non-Haskell projects such as StumpWM, Mnemosyne, GNU Emacs18 etc. but not in major ways, so I do not list them here:

When I say research assistant, I mean it in the older sense of someone who does detail work for another person’s original research - so I spend a lot of time reading up on specific areas and making notes about stuff my boss needs, and only occasionally do independent work. Not all my work can be made public, but some of it is. A partial list in rough chronological order:

One of my first projects was working on this paper - digging up citations for various claims and giving general feedback; most of my changes or comments are private when we switched to working through Google Docs, but some of my initial comments were public.

Summarizing some of the existing research; besides being intrinsically interesting, this is also relevant to computer intelligence - if achievement is just a reflection of IQ, then any computer intelligence will improve on humans only to the extent it has greater raw intelligence, but if achievement is limited past 130s IQ, then the picture becomes more complex. (Computer intelligence may be far more more powerful than predicted for a given intelligence level because there’s no apparent reason you couldn’t easily make its personality open-minded - it not really being clear that truly random exploration and computing power don’t yield creativity in some fields already - and a computer can be tireless and self-disciplined, which takes care of Conscientiousness. On the other hand, Openness and Conscientiousness may correspond to subtle high-level dynamics which can’t be easily designed into an AI and can’t be produced by throwing computing power at the problem, in which case the AI will underperform whatever measure of intelligence we ultimately use, like AIXI-style IQ tests.)

Philosophy essay summarizing and attempting to analyze a recent class of objections to utilitarianism (that one cannot judge utilities of lives, and hence the utilitarian ethical project is impossible).

Neuroscience additions to Wikipedia; I had a hard time finding references for a SIAI paper, and donated my results to Wikipedia so at least no one else has to suffer so much:

The following is a list of my submissions to LW I regard as substantive or particularly good, excluding content which can be found on gwern.net, in chronological order with interesting ones highlighted:

Of course, I don’t agree with every SIAI or LW position. The intellectual homogeneity has been much over-estimated by outsiders who have not bothered to look at the annual surveys, I think. Here are some major points for me:

MWI: I think that LWers who were persuaded by Eliezer’s MWI writings are wrong to do so, as they are unfamiliar with even the rudiments of any alternatives interpretations and cannot judge in the matter; how many LWers have ever seriously looked at all the competing theories, or could even name many alternatives? (Collapse, MWI, uh…), much less could discuss why they dislike pilot waves or whatever. Lacking any real understanding, they ought to simply adopt the expert consensus, where MWI seems to have a plurality or bare majority of adherents (with the weak confidence that implies).

Heuristics and cognitive biases: I am not much convinced that knowledge of heuristics & biases help in ordinary life. Feedback & learning are powerful tools in eliminating error, calibrating predictions, and justify committing what may look like the sunk cost fallacy; and feedback is what one gets in ordinary life.

Per Moravec’s paradox, where our knowledge of heuristics & biases will pay off most is in what Hanson would call Far scenarios: evolutionary novel situations with few precedents and only costly or non-existent feedback. (For example, the question of whether artificial intelligence will be developed by 2040: it will only happen or not once, there are few comparable events, the consequences may be dramatic, and our ordinary lives offer no useful insights.) As it happens, this describes much of futurism & forecasting but we cannot justify our futurism by claiming its techniques are incredibly valuable in ordinary life!

Cryonics girl: The donations appall me, for reasons I lay out at length there - they are a complete abandonment of core ideas like utilitarianism & optimal philanthropy.

Alicorn’s Living Luminously paradigm struck me as dubious, not backed by even token research, and likely idiosyncratic to her; I thought her Luminosity e-novel was merely OK despite the endless discussions on LW (rivaling those for Methods of Rationality itself) and that her followup, Radiance, was just terrible. Nevertheless, her novel career seems to continue.

See also Experience in Purchasing Behavior Scale & Kentucky Inventory of Mindfulness Skills.↩

For further reading on overconfidence, see all LW articles so tagged. I once read in a book of a study in which subjects were asked to generate ideas for, IIRC, putting out a fire, and to stop only when they were convinced they had thought up all good ones, and usually stopping when they had thought up only a third; but I have been unable to refind it and would appreciate knowing details if this description rings any bells for a reader.↩